Map features

[jSylvestre]

The map to draw fields does not have a lot of details, so it is difficult for them to draw small fields in accurate locations.

As a mitigation, it would be helpful if there was a satellite overlay.

[jSylvestre]

https://github.com/ucdavis/cecdss/commit/fd807e3489b872223b5aa6d2702488b023c18284

[laholstege]

alright so i've done a bunch of investigating and here are our options for getting a satellite view:

• use mapbox as our data source, use react-leaflet, react-leaflet-draw for rendering

  • PRO: easy to integrate, comes with a satellite view without any config, only a few lines of code
  • CON: has a limit on number of free monthly loads/initializations of the map (50,000) and then gets quite expensive. we would likely not hit that quickly but it would be a pain to be tied to it or have to move away from mapbox later
  • this is what we use for CECDSS ☝️

• use ArcGIS as our data source, use react-leaflet, esri-leaflet for rendering

  • we have access through ArcGIS Online. i was able to make an API key through the Developer Dashboard.
  • PROS: more reliable (free!) access. have the option of incorporating other layers and features of ArcGIS
  • CONS: i haven't (yet) been able to get it to work with leaflet–the basemap (which is what the satellite is) requires more fiddling with esri-leaflet, and there isn't an up-to-date well supported react package. also might conflict with react-leaflet-draw, which is what we're using to draw polygons–it isn't compatible with hooks (yuck, hate that) and the stuff i was trying to do to get this to work required me to do useRef(). i could do that inside the class but this is where i stopped.

which leads me to another option:

• use ArcGIS Maps SDK for js
  • i haven't looked into this very much / haven't tried it out. but we should be able to use this directly in react. e.g. this example using arcgis-core.
  • PROS: looks fairly simple to use. opens up the possibility of doing a lot with ArcGIS. there's a lot of cool examples. requires learning more about ArcGIS
  • CONS: might not be as easy to use as it looks. requires learning more about ArcGIS. also requires us to answer questions like: should the polygons be a layer in ArcGIS? how do we interact with that data? would that change what we store in the db?
  • here's their vscode extension
  • and .NET tools

[laholstege]

going to look into ArcGIS Maps SDK for js next. they also offer .NET tools

[laholstege]

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